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Islamic State‚Äôs New Weapon Of Choice: Off-the-Shelf Drones

The conflicts in Iraq and Syria have seen the rise of a new form of unmanned warfare, the large-scale use of weaponized consumer drones. Islamic State group militants have also built a significant micro-UAV capability, and continue to grow that by leveraging commercial technology.
This is not the first use of drones by nonstate actors. Hezbollah has been flying UAVs since 2004, some carrying explosives. However, while Hezbollah claims its Mirsad drones are built locally, they appear to be ...

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The nearest US equivalent would be the LMAMS (Lethal Miniature Aerial Muntion System), which is not yet a program of record after several years, is a single-use weapon rather than being reusable, and will cost at least 20x the IS consumer drones. So you're about right.

Today you can buy a 3-pack of the AMTEC "Skynet" anti-drone shotgun shells for $20 online. The US Army tested them out in December on a small scale preliminary run, liked what they saw, then contracted to buy a bunch more for extensive testing and deployment. They're good up to 1,200 ft AGL, and can be fired out of any ordinary 12-ga shotgun with a special rifled choke tube installed at the muzzle that imparts spin. Larger models up to 40mm are also commercially available, using a special purpose modified shotgun launcher.

So to shoot down those silly jihadi two thousand dollar drones with their VERY VERY SCARY hacked programming that converts them into a highly capable, fully autonomous precision bombing platform that no military organization on earth has possession of (?????) ... all it takes is a $300 shotgun and $7 worth of shotshells.

This should have been painfully obvious to anybody as this technology became cheaper. When you can buy GPS and Inertial Guidance devices for pennies; then it was simply a matter of time for terrorists to use them for delivery of death.
Since manufacturers have a responsibility against the misuse of these items, they should have built in vulnerability that allows them to be destroyed easily. Perhaps it is too late?

DJI upgrade the s/w and firmware every 2 - 3 weeks, so there's an opportunity. However, the drone user has to connect the "GO" app (iphone/android) to the web to catch the update. Once that is caught, the drone cannot fly w/o its firmware (and the controller's) being updated.

For the terrorists it's simply a matter of not ever connecting the app to the internet to avoid a forced update.

OTOH, as drones are consumed in use over time, later bought drones could have a remote kill ability via the vendor. The rest of the user base would not be amused at the potential of that being misused.

These drones are controlled in the 2.4 GHz "WiFi" band - so jamming that frequency is one means of defeating them (it is also the video relay frequency). (Note the "weapons" payload might be on a completely different frequency - such as cellular).

Captured ISIS workshops indicate that they already have the ability to fit their own communications and even build drones from scratch using components. And given that DJI's geofencing software has been hacked, I suspect the hacker community will be able to bypass any other attempts at consumer control.

No manufacturer has any responsibility regarding the end-use of its product, especially not toy-UAV manufacturers.
Is Toyota responsible if i use my car to run over people on purpose?
No manufacturer can control the end-use of products.

Shot fired from a tube on the ground lose most of their kinetic energy within about 40-50 yards, just due to air resistance of the round shot. We could use a grenade launcher to fire a fragmentation grenade, with either a fairly crude altitude-setting fuse based on estimated drone altitude (a range finder provides that) ... or a more advanced proximity fuse. Such a weapon would be fairly inexpensive.

I rather expect the Army and Marines are busily working on such weapons now.

And in the meantime, the US military most certainly IS working on light weight field directed energy weapons for just this purpose. A small such weapon for short range fires would need only a relatively small power source, perhaps from a vehicle or even a backpack power pack.

Frankly, the idea that some jihadi with a DJI Phantom can hover at 500 feet above ground and drop a grenade into an open hatch on a tank or troop carrier, and actually, you know, get a hit is ridiculous fantasy.

If the drone stops still and hovers, it gets shot out of the sky. If the drone is maneuvering, it will need a complex targeting system that accounts for the motion of the drone as well as the motion of the target, and corrects for wind speed and direction. And even such a beast existed - that will never be a commercial off the shelf product - it would still miss the target most of the time. That's if it weren't shot down or had its wifi jammed.

Basically, this is mission impossible at 500 feet. The drone would have to come within 100 feet or less above ground and hover stock still over the target to give itself any reasonable chance at all to air drop a grenade and actually damage the target. At that altitude, it will be an easy target for a rifleman or a couple of guys with autoloading shotguns.

Suggest you take a look at some of the videos on YouTube. They are hitting with uncanny accuracy -- including vehicle hatches - from several hundred feet. Obviously you don't see the misses, but this is a real capability,

Mr. Hambling, internet video is easily staged and edited for PR purposes. The ISIS jihadis in particular are experts at propaganda.

You obviously don't understand the physics and mathematics in dropping bombs from aircraft.

Even armed with what was then a top secret state of the art mechanical computer known as the Norden bomb sight, about 95% of all the bombs dropped by American medium to heavy bombers in World War Two missed their targets, whether at low altitude or high, and whether night time or so-called "precision daytime bombing". It is for that reason that both the Brits and the USAAF eventually discarded the entire notion of precision bombing, and reverted to "area bombing" with a mixture of HEX and incendiaries by late 1944 and early 1945 in order to have any impact at all on defeating both the Japanese and the Germans. Many hundreds of thousands of civilians died as a result - from Dresden to Tokyo.

Yes, but that would mean the drone itself would have to come in on a path direct o the target, flying low and slow and close up. These quadcopters fly very slow, slower than most gamebirds or songbirds can fly. The DJI is not small either - about 2 feet prop tip to prop tip, far larger than any game bird, and slower flying, on a direct path to the target/shooter. Easy peasy to shoot down with a trained US infantry rifleman armed with a standard issue M-4 carbine. One round through a prop disk as a minimum makes it unstable if not unflyable, a round through any part of the structure and it's down.

They're also, contrary to the author's assertion, not difficult at all to shoot down with a common military assault rifle or carbine and a trained US infantry rifleman.

That's in complete contradiction to news reports from Iraq and Syria. Take a look at some of the news videos. Even if you see them -- which is not easy when you are in a vehicle -- they are not easily hit.

Well yeah, but compare the minimum airspeeds. Dropping a grenade straight down from 500ft with 0 airspeed is actually pretty easy. Believe me, I used to live in a high rise about that tall, and it wouldnt have been hard to drop a rock within 15ft of a passer-by.

And yes, they can zig zag around well enough to dodge fire and then proceed to stop to drop their payload.

Any maneuvering by the target at all and they miss (do you think our guys are going to stand immobile immediately under a hovering quadcopter, and watch it as a grenade drops 500 feet, or with a hatch open? It takes almost six seconds for the grenade to fall to the ground from that altitude - that's an eternity.

Sorry - this is an internet myth that's completely implausible by MythBusters standards.

This weapon is terrorizing Iraqi troops, and many have been killed by it. On the scene video from the front, shot by major news networks, shows it happening, and interviews with Iraqi commanders on the front lines indicate they now see it as a primary lethal threat.

As a drone owner, I can tell you if you're at that height you're not going to be effective or see much in detail. Now there are also commercially available shotgun shells that deploy a drone-snaring net.

Aye aye, the ISIL has still enough petrol dough (thanks, Turkey, Saudis etc.) to buy such things over the counter by hundreds. And indeed, progress is a double sided weapon - the tracer works both ways, as the grunts use to say. For "them" it is enough to read AWST, AIAA Journal and the like, ponder the info for a few days and then go and buy the cheapo version of what the USAF/USN/US Army/USMC is going to have developed in the next two decades for umpteen bilion dollars...

Quad copter types of drones that are currently commercially available rely on GPS for navigation whether or not they are actively piloted or autonomous. I have read various sources that indicate that GPS signals can be spoofed and/or jammed, and that may be a valid method of fighting these 'drones'. It would be much more difficult to combat an autonomous drone relying on inertial navigation, and I assume currently available 'drones' can be modified to rely on inertial navigation systems.

As far as placing ordnance on target, currently available small copter-type drones are limited in range, duration and load carrying abilities. With that in mind, I don't think that they can yet replace the good old-fashioned, ground-based mortar tube when it comes to considerations of lethality and economy.

Commercially-available copter 'drones' are very effective surveillance tools and constitute a significant threat to security. Hopefully, our (United States) military is actively working on measures to counter them.

As mentioned in the piece, optical navigation makes GPS jamming or spoofing futile.

And placing a series of 40mm HEDP grenades on target with high precision - even dropping them into vehicle hatches - makes drones much more effective than any unguided mortar rounds. Also much cheaper -- an M224 mortar costs over $10k, a small drone under $2k

My knowledge of optical navigation systems is extremely limited; however, it is my understanding that such systems are currently useful only in the targeting phase of a mission and that navigation to the target area relies on other systems. The scenario you described above, dropping 40mm grenades " ... with high precision ... " would be the role in which optical navigation systems would excel.

First of all, dropping grenades from a flying/maneuvering drone (it has to be moving or it's a dead duck for sharpshooters on the ground) is going to be anything but accurate. The operators have to be in wifi contact with the drone to order the weapon drop .. and there is no way in the world that these two thousand dollar drones are going to serve as autonomous weapons launchers. Only a teenager with a video game jones would believe in such an impossible scenario.

So all we have to do is jam the wifi and we defeat these cheap drones, despite the silly comments above to the contrary.

You don't get it. A motion detector, with a lock on it, is not a ballistic computer. One is easy, the other does not exist in any commercially available product. You can't just hack into the code on an OTS commercial drone and convert it into a ballistic computer, which is what a targeting system is.

But, FWIW, even small drones have far better instrumentation (optical sensors, gyro, accelerometer, computing power) than the old Norden bombsight, and a much easier task: and I have talked to researchers who are doing exactly what you say they cannot do, using existing hardware with new software to allow drones to drop precision payloads.

These quads can be flown w/o receiving GPS in what is called "ATTI" mode.

Jamming? Aim a high powered RF jammer in the control channel (WiFi 2.4 GHz) at it and it will stop in mid air. If its "home point" was recorded (normally is), it will start to fly back to that point until it receives the controller signal again.

(The above applies to all recent DJI drones).

Relatively cheap, directional jammers can be made and distributed ... by drone.

Might be a good time to go open source on countermeasures. So far the opposition has been able to hack video on military drones and all the consumer product is hackable. I know there are microwave "shotguns" that take down commercial drones. The French seem to be using trained eagles for this.
I'd like to see a minidrone swarm with explosives sniffing that just goes where the explosives are as a way to locate manufactories and IEDs. All this is well within the reach of the open source community if there was some way to actually get the military to consider using it.

It's only a matter of time until they (bad guys) attach spray mechanisms to them and spray lethal poisons over crowds at large sporting events using pre-planned programming (thus jammer proof) Even off the shelf "hornet spray" or something similar would cause incredible panic and death by crowds running over each other trying to get out. Could be done without the perpetrators whereabouts ever being found out. I'm actually very surprised this hasn't happened already. There needs to be a way to defeat these kind of attacks. I really have no idea how though, at least not without great expense.

Your "matter of time" is already here! Google "DJI Agras MG-1" to find information on this 'drone' aerial application system. Here's the description from their website:

"The powerful propulsion system enables the MG-1 to carry up to 10kg of liquid payloads, including pesticide and fertilizer. The combination of speed and power means that an area of 4,000-6,000 m¬≤ can be covered in just 10 minutes, or 40 to 60 times faster than manual spraying operations. The intelligent spraying system automatically adjusts its spray according to the flying speed so that an even spray is always applied. This way, the amount of pesticide or fertilizer is precisely regulated to avoid pollution and economize operations."

If that doesn't scare the hell out of you, it certainly should. As vkess1 pointed out, it could cause panic at a major sporting event, just by spraying distilled water.

Off-the-Shelves drones in the hands of IS militants or North Koreans is indeed a doomsday scenario, which is unfortunately very possible. I hope that both the US and European forces have invested sufficient resources and money for qualifying drone killers and that they are available to our troops and special police forces. The guys on the other side will not wait for us to have certified and working counter-systems.

But there is no commercial drone that is an autonomous target-seeking weapons platform. No such "off the shelf" drone will ever be allowed to be manufactured and sold to consumers - any such capability will be just as regulated and limited as is manpad production today. Drones are now being regulated, and the regulation we have today is only going to get more specific in order to prevent weaponized systems from ending up being sold on Amazon to terrorists.

ISIS are not using their drones quiet 'off-the-shelf' and several workshops have been discovered in which they are building their own (fixed wing) drones from scratch.
The commercial technology will not be sold for military use, but enterprising terrorists will not have any shortage of software that is, for example, able to find and home in on people -- it's what some selfie drones do already.
The ISIS experience shows that can be done easily with current technology. But, thanks to DJI and others, the technology is getting much better very rapidly. Whether the military procurement process can churn out countermeasures at the same pace is a real concern.

How many of these can you buy for the price of 1 F-35? One of the lessons of WW2 was that to win you need lots of good stuff and not a little of the best stuff. Sherman tanks vs Tiger tanks, Mustangs vs Me 262s. The program to get to the target area is quick, easy and cheap to write only then do you have to link to a visual attack and weapon delivery mode.

Even if the sale of drones was made illegal, physically impossible, Additive manufacturing and a little imagination can make more. Computer programing to not include serial number and they become intractable. Buying ready made may be easier, but traceable.

I think we are headed into the anti-drone drone era. It could be like the rapid aircraft developments of WW I on a miniature scale. And a whole new definition of Air Superiority....how do you define it when you're talking about an area of 10s of square miles....not exactly the purview of F22s. Having Air Supremacy in a theater doesn't help the ground element if you don't have it directly over the area of ops from 1000ft down to the ground. Drones with a range of 10's or miles, speeds greater than 30-40mph, complete autonomy with GPS or INS (MEMS INS is getting cheaper), pattern recognition, and a reasonable weapon and fuzing sets up a distributed version of Pearl Harbor. How many parked F22ss or C17s could be taken out in a simultaneous mass swarm attack against the fixed bases. The threat and the tech capabilities are there and we need to seriously defend against them.